The Years After
by Josephine de Chagny
Summary: A short account of some milestones in healing after the events that final night under the opera house.
1. Chapter 1

Six hours after being forced to make one of the most difficult decisions of her life, Christine clung to Raoul and wept. Every time she closed her eyes she relived the events in Erik's home on the lake. Every time she closed her eyes, she could feel his lips, bloated and wet, pressed against hers. She could feel his deformity against her hands even as she clung to the vicomte.

For weeks she couldn't sleep, plagued constantly by dreams too horrible for her to describe, but Raoul had a suspicion he knew their content.


	2. Chapter 2

Six months after Erik set her free, Christine married Raoul in a small, intimate ceremony attended only by the Girys and Raoul's sisters. Their honeymoon was spent in London, where Christine finally was able to stop looking over her shoulder for the ghost she knew had to be lurking just a few steps behind.


	3. Chapter 3

A year after being faced with the impossible decision of remaining with Erik in exchange for Raoul's life, or being granted her freedom at the cost of his life, Christine woke in tears from the same horrible nightmare that had plagued her since that night. Next to her, Raoul slept peacefully, his face the picture of childlike innocence it had been before that night. In the moonlight, she watched his chest rise and fall as she tried to slow her own breathing.

She stood and crossed the room, where she sat at her vanity and lit a candle. Her reflection showed a gaunt, haunted woman with constant bags under her icy blue eyes. Her hair hung limply around the pale, nearly translucent flesh of her skin. She felt more like a forty-year-old than a freshly twenty-two-year-old woman.

She sat at the mirror and stared at herself until the candle nearly burnt itself out before she went back to bed and curled up next to her husband once more.


	4. Chapter 4

Two years after a nightmare had unfolded beneath the opera house, Christine was pregnant with Raoul's and her first child. She nearly forgot about the anniversary until Raoul found a single red rose on their doorstep. When he'd brought it inside and given it to Christine, her knees had given out and she collapsed to the floor in a fit of terrified sobbing.

It was that moment that had made up their minds for them. Three months later, they moved out to the country, far from Paris and the horrors of that night. Their only son, Charles, was born there a month later.


	5. Chapter 5

After five years, Christine only had nightmares involving Erik when particularly stressed. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw something closer to what she had been before everything had gone so horribly wrong. Her son brought out the best in her, and she even was beginning to find her voice again, much to Raoul's delight.

At twenty-seven, her skin was finally regaining some color and she'd put on a bit of healthy weight. Her smile came far more naturally and stayed longer on her face before being reclaimed by the worried frown that had taken over her face for so long.

The nightmares didn't come as frequently, and usually they wouldn't send her into a screaming panic only to be consoled by crying herself back to sleep in fear of things she never told her husband.

Over time, her nightmares had evolved. No longer did they involve Erik taking her _and_ killing Raoul. Now she saw something far more frightening. She saw herself as his prisoner, as a woman who wasn't allowed to leave his home or his side. She saw herself subjected to the horrors hidden by the mask. When she woke in horror, she always had a moment of real fear that she hadn't been dreaming as she woke to the near-black darkness of their country home.

It was only the sound of Charles tossing and turning in his sleep that would bring her back to reality and eventually draw her from her bed to cuddle with her child.


	6. Chapter 6

Ten years after Erik granted Christine her freedom, the nightmares had finally stopped.

With twenty years came a feeling of lightness and freedom unlike anything she had felt since before her father had died.

After thirty years, Christine was nearly unrecognizable. Her hair was cropped short and was whiter than snow, and her face was set with deep laugh lines and wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes. But none of these were so incredible as the wide smile that rarely was absent from her face. She was happy to greet anybody who visited her and her husband.


	7. Chapter 7

Thirty-four years after leaving Erik behind, Christine had the best day she'd had in nearly a decade. She was awake all day, and even able to talk more-or-less clearly with her family. In the afternoon, she met her grandchildren for the first time. With Raoul squeezing her hand tight, she told her son how proud she was of him and the family he was raising.

When Raoul helped her to bed that night, she kissed him goodnight and told him she loved him as she did every night.

But unlike every other night, this one saw Christine's final breath. As she slept next to her husband, lying close as lovers yet somehow not touching one another, Christine's chest rose and fell with increasingly labored breaths until she took one long, gasping breath, and while exhaling loosed her soul from the shackles of her body.

All at once, Christine found herself in her dressing room at the opera house wearing a dressing gown, her hair curled and pulled back perfectly to frame her face. Looking in the mirror, she saw herself as a teenager- young, beautiful, and positively radiant- and she saw the outline of a familiar face that she couldn't quite place.

As the mirror swung open, she found herself looking up into the eyes of her angel of music, his deformity gone, his smile genuine, his eyes happy.

He extended a white gloved hand to her, and through the corridors beneath the opera house he escorted her to their own personal heaven.


	8. Chapter 8

Forty-nine years to the minute after the premiere performance of _Don Juan Triumphant_, Raoul de Chagny closed his eyes for the last time, and at last was reunited with his wife, who he now was glad to share with the man who no longer needed a mask.


End file.
